To Kenna, it implied that Mandia, unlike her fellow pro-to-Oracles whose health was dreadful and worsening, might some day be able to take care of herself, living a reasonably independent life, provided her environment was not overly challenging.
Kenna’s timetable matched the weightiness of her intent: to get everything right, she expected another five years of work, and would be happy if it was longer. No sense of hurry infected her work, until one Shyedemday in the month of Jyueech, when her most distant sensors perceived alarm signals at the Palace perimeter, along with the tang of burnt flesh, before coherent graser beams tore through her furthest components and all sensation there was lost.
Palace Avernon was under attack.
My fault, Alvix.
Her Liege Lord – except that she had never sworn legal fealty, neither to him nor his forebears, not even the Duke – had made enemies, by virtue of his experimental Oraculum, and the potential wealth and political threat it represented. She should have been more forceful in telling him to form strong alliances, or else in strengthening his demesne’s defences. Even now she could sense Palace guards, attempting to rush to the attack location, being blocked by quickstone walls flowing across corridors and hardening in place, resistant even to grasers: the result of sophisticated sabotage, subverting the Palace itself.
She had done the same, of course, for very different purposes.
I’m years from being ready.
But she was even less prepared to die, and if the Palace was being attacked with subversive femtovectors, she had to trigger the transfer now, before her distributed self could be caught up in the sabotageware attack, and her mind was rewritten. That could not be allowed.
So it happens today.
Quickstone under her control melted away, forming access tunnels to a hidden chamber where her masterpiece lay on a couch formed of steel and platinum: a body of living crystal, grown and adapted from a tiny fragment of that ancient crystal spearhead, linked by a thousand crystal fibres to her cyborg nervous system, embedded in the Palace walls.
Some fibres ran all the way to her pseudo-face and other components splayed against the side of Alvix’s main laboratory chamber, where he had been working but had now vacated – her optical surveillance sensors told her in the seconds before she shut them down for ever – and was now running towards the Great Hall, calling for Lady Suzanne.
Conscious of her face on that laboratory wall, she closed her eyes for the final time, and felt her sensations withdraw as she triggered the process now.
System.getController( ).getTransform(Project.Metamorph).initialize( )
Every part of her seemed to shudder, though she had no proprioceptive or autokinetic senses in her current form, the distributed body she was about to leave.
And she wanted to scream but her output channels were already disconnected; and then it began.
Transfer.
Afterwards, it was like remembering dying – again – with every separate thread and shard of cognition accompanied by howling, burning pain. Cascades of processes split apart, rushed headlong to their new receptacles, and came crashing together in a torrent of new computation, far closer to death than birth because a baby during expulsion from the womb is yet to have a mind, while she destroyed – had to destroy – every part of her complex, long-lived self in order to survive.
The ceiling was above/before her when she opened her eyes.
I will have to move.
This was supposed to have been years in duration, the process of learning to move once more, the gradual sharing of thoughts between her Palace embedded self and this new – glorious! – form. But her old self was gone.
Really move, because they can kill me now.
She looked like nothing anyone would recognise. Any Palace guard or member of the attacking forces would trigger their weapons at the sight of her, and at this stage she was not even sure that she could walk, let alone run or fight.
The transformation, performed this way instead of to plan, had left her vulnerable. A baby without care will not survive; but she had to survive, because she was needed, and if she could not get through one armed attack, what use would she be in the great confrontation to come?
She wondered if Alvix was calling her, if he had time to be shocked or feel regret at her old self’s death, or whether he was wrapped up in thoughts of his own and Lady Suzanne’s survival. That probably depended on the attack force’s orders: if their objective was to steal the contents of the Oraculum and get away, that would bode better than if they intended to secure the Palace while an occupation force made its way here, and then took over.
Strange sensations washed through her as she sat up – for the first time in over a century – and looked down at her new body. Everything was immediate and odd and beautiful in its intensity, and the danger lay in her growing enraptured at her own existence and failing to take action right now because this was mortal danger unless she got her act together and actually bloody moved.
Fibres withdrew into her, disconnecting her from the old, dead Kenna system, and then she did something simple, ordinary and yet entirely miraculous: she swung her legs to one side of the couch, leant forward . . .
Amazing.
. . . and stood.
On actual feet.
With legs.
A body.
Arms and hands . . .
Focus.
Everything so wonderful.
Focus now.
She swayed, balance tipping. Corrected herself.
Got it.
Took a step.
A second step.
Definitely got it now.
Third step, and it was almost automatic, in time with a distant bang followed by screams.
Time to really move.
She was most of the way to one of her primary escape routes, feeling guilty yet desperate because of her selfish focus on survival of self – and hang the rest – when she saw in her mind’s eye a helpless, addled girl-woman, the victim of worldly ambition more than logosophical exploration, and then there was a feeling of relief that it was necessary to go back and confront the danger. There are times when you want to do something and are scared to, have found excuses to avoid it; and then some factor forces you to do it anyway, and all you can feel is thankful that you’ve been forced to do the right thing, to confront the fear: that was how Kenna felt now.
Mandia had foreseen liquid crystal moving, but to Kenna’s knowledge the poor girl had never had an opportunity to see such a thing; yet every prediction was a verbal description of something she was to see in the future. For her prediction to be true, she must survive the armed assault in order to see . . . well, Kenna as she was now. So for all her vulnerability in her stumbling new body, Kenna could not abandon Mandia, not if there was a risk of Mandia’s dying.
The alternative was . . . what? Death by paradox? The self-immolation of a closed time like curve of events? Of people that had existed and events that had occurred but would turn out never to have been?
Once upon a time I was a fighter.
Never mind her notions of becoming a general, a chief of staff, a war leader in ages to come: this was immediate, raw, physical danger and she had to face it or the rest was nonsense. She gestured to the nearest wall, and waited for the Palace to recognise the codes she broadcast by microwave from her hand. It took a full half-second for the Palace to make the adjustment to her new form; then the wall liquefied and melted open, revealing one of the hidden servitor tunnels (it would not do for the nobility to be distracted by the sight of menial workers engaged on mundane tasks) and stepped inside.
Leaning forward slightly, she forced herself into a shuffling jog, a shamble compared to her mental image of running freely, but as she followed the tunnel her gait became smoother, then smoother again, through an incremental sequence of improvements; and by the time she drew near to the Oraculum, she was running faster than any but the fittest of endurance athletes.